Do animals have spirits?

If you had asked me such a question some years ago, I probably would have given you some theoretical answer based on things I have read in books or seen in movies or gotten from the Web. But the issue became a very real and personal one for me a year ago, with the passing of our family’s dog, as I wrote about in this blog space.

My wife was haranguing me to get to the dinner table; we were already running late. “Wait a minute,” I said from the entryway by our front door. “I think she’s going.” I didn’t want to come back after dinner only to find that a beloved member of our family had already left. My instinct told me to stay with our dog. It was a very good thing I did.

It was yesterday evening, Monday, and our 15-year-old golden retriever, Marron (Spanish for "brown"), seemed to be hyperventilating as she lay helplessly on her side on a blanket just inside the front door of our home. We’d had an emergency house-call visit from a doctor of a nearby animal hospital earlier in the day — the second such visit in the past few days.